Five Stages of Grief
by Deltra 307
Summary: It starts with a corpse in a habit and a man driven insane screaming through the night because of it. - Nikki/Mary; Operation: Mindcrime
1. denial

_i. denial_

* * *

It starts with his head slammed into a desk, eyes exploding into one thousand supernovas and the screaming of a choir numbering two million kick starting in the back of his head all in unison. Blind – from the impact, from the shock, from the start of jolting awake and his brain suffering from more than one sort of whiplash. Handcuffed – wrists pulling apart from one another only to find themselves locked firmly behind his back, behind the rickety chair that cries out in agony with each subtle shift of his trembling legs. A _hostage_ – kidnapped by the law, broken by hypocrisy, held by his own guilty subconscious. For what, he can't remember, mind still reeling from the force of the blow and what he vaguely recalls as some greater tragedy further still into the past, but it's certainly _there_ , and it's taking its sweet time tying his stomach into more knots than he could ever hope to count. Dizziness spills over him like water from the faucet, like hot breath from parted lips, and it isn't his fault that he can't find it in himself to comprehend the words dancing in the periphery of his mind; he hears the anger, but not the meaning, and he's only just realized that whoever had been spewing what was registering as little more than nonsense into the air has paused when, once again, fingers find themselves in his scalp, pulling up and into the air and forcing down, down, down toward the earth. Down, down, down toward the table. Reality breaks into focus with the attack, splatter paintings of colors behind his eyelids finally registering as the dirty interrogation room he's being held in.

Nikki's heart pauses, the rest of his body joining in to lurch to a sudden halt at the sight, but scraping his thoughts for some idea of what has landed himself in this situation ( _watched by the condescending eyes of the woman across the room, still at the mercy of the temperamental man grunting with impatience behind him_ ) earns him nothing more than a blank mind. He'd press the concern further – it _must_ be important if the police have taken him into custody, right? - but not a moment is wasted before they're talking again, asking if he'll ( _demanding that he_ ) start cooperating, and he can't leave them waiting any more than he already has if he wants to spare his skull from cracking due to repeated table-related injury. As such, he nods numbly, aching head pulling itself sluggishly through the motions as it tries to focus more on what they are questioning him about than his retreating and returning vision and the camera eye watching his every move from above. They speak, words suddenly crisp against his eardrums, and the images and sounds come rushing back to him in a torrent. _Oh_. So it doesn't start with his head slammed into a desk -

It starts with a corpse in a habit and a man driven insane screaming through the night because of it. Mary's corpse; his own legs carrying him through Seattle's rainy streets, waking the dead hours of the early morning.

And they believe that _he_ was the one who killed her.

Perhaps he did. The gun may have been in his hands, and it could have been his index finger that pulled the trigger to end her existence in this world. But they don't _understand_ , because even if it was his body, it definitely wasn't his mind, so it couldn't have been his fault. "I didn't do it," he repeats in a mantra each time they ask if he was responsible for the murder of the nun, each time they ask who it was if he was not to blame. Fingers dig into the solid surface of the table before him, body quivering at a morbid slideshow of images that replay in his mind over and over again and his lip's inability to form any sentence other than the repeated insistence that he has done nothing wrong, but his relatively functioning mind is still working enough to be amazed at how long they continue to press him before realizing it to be a futile effort. ( _Working enough to flood with horror when he realizes that – unable to get so much as a_ name _out of their supposed murderer – they plan to admit him to the state hospital._ )

She haunts his mind, and in the early days, it's her alone. The golden tresses of her hair get tangled in his own pale mop of curls; the hymns she had loved, sang with strength pulled from false dedication, ring in his ears; the sight of her face, smiling at him when all others would have spat, burns itself behind his eyelids and throws him back into awareness with each closing of the eyes. Mary is long gone, now, off to an afterlife she had so firmly believed in ( _the sort that could never accept failures like himself_ ), but he swears he can see her in the crowd as they half lead, half drag him out to his new "home" ( _new prison_ ), and the nurse they assign him sounds just like she would have had the nun held as much hatred for him as everyone else in the psychiatric ward ( _in the city beyond_ ). Sometimes, it's suffocating, just how much he misses her. Worse still is the cascading guilt that comes with knowing that she could have been alive if only they had not befriended one another all of those eternities ago. She should have known better than to get involved with a hitman – and he should have known better than to let her get to him.

On the nights that he's hysterical, eyes wild, arms tossing like salad in a mixing bowl, practically foaming at the mouth, he tries to solace himself as what seems like half of the entire ward seems to come in to sedate him. If she didn't ever mean anything to him in the first place, her death can't break him the way it does – the way it has. If he never loved her from the start – loved her voice, the honey sweet words, the way she forgave him where the rest of the world would have wanted him dead – then he wouldn't have found himself here at all. If only he didn't believe in love – he _doesn't believe in love_ -

Nikki remembers her rosary in illness-inducing detail, and he wishes that he could say he didn't.

* * *

 **Well, well, well, long time, no see. How long has it been since I updated anything on this site? What, a year and a half? Two years? I could apologize for the lack of productivity on the fanfiction front – but let's be real here: No one was exactly waiting on pins and needles for an update from me, anyway. Largely because the only things people would want me to update are those old Pokemon and Warriors stories, most of which I find unsalvageable and worth keeping up only to cry at. That's how bad they are. ouo So, rather than writingin familiar territory, I bring to you a work from perhaps one of the most obscure fandoms you could image, and definitely the most obscure I'll ever write for (and that's even taking into consideration that I might start writing things for the Abhorsen trilogy now that I'm done with them all). Hello, friends, and welcome to the start of what will probably be a long series of Operation: Mindcrime novelizations, one-shots, and potential stories. 8D**

 **This is actually a short story that I wrote for our high school's literary and arts magazine, split into five parts for each of the five stages of grief as you... could have probably guessed. The only reason I've split this into thousand word (give or take) chapters is the fact that this spans not only the first, but the second Operation: Mindcrime albums. This actually starts toward the end of the first – if you've listened to the original source, you've probably recognized this as the scenes from _I Don't Believe in Love_ – so spoilers for those who _haven't_ listened to the original source are still inevitable, but for those of you who haven't listened to the second... well, there's a sequel and I'm giving you time to listen to it. Not that it's worth it. Honestly, It's probably a bullet dodged if you pretend the sequel doesn't exist at all. (Sorry, Dio, but even your involvement couldn't save it.) For those of you who are incredibly confused and/or have never even _heard_ of the name Operation: Mindcrime, don't feel bad. I have a strong feeling that most everyone on this site hasn't the foggiest of what it is, much less that it exists. In short, it's a studio album by the band Queensryche in which every song tells a chronological (save for the flashback) story about a drug addict who is manipulated into joining a corrupt anarchist revolution. The feels are strong in this one, and it takes less than an hour to experience the whole thing, so if you like tragic love stories and lots of mind manipulation, ten out of ten doctors recommend...**

 **Anywho, seeing as the whole story's already written out, you don't have to worry about me not finishing this one. It's already done. Instead, you get to wait on those aforementioned (nonexistent) pins and needles for the not-so-lovely chapter two, Anger. Until then, (equally nonexistent) readers~!**


	2. anger

_ii. anger_

* * *

Cycles. His life is a series of _cycles_ ; one horror traded for another at each twist and turn of his existence, and the name Nikki Strauss would mean nothing without its morbid routines trailing on the last syllables of the title. Work for Doctor X, too, had been nothing but a continuous circle of hits, meetings, meals, and more hits still, and even the small reprieve he'd had upon leaving only earned him a new schedule to follow all the same ( _alongside a dead lover_ ): sleep, remember, sedatives, forget, and repeat. He loses himself in the morning and reclaims his history in dreams, but as dull sunlight filtering through Seattle's rainy clouds splatter against his ghostly pale skin in the day that follows, he finds himself once again without any recollection of who he is and how he has managed to land himself in a room set aside for only the most criminally insane. Nurses hiss profanities at him from under their breath, his doctor seemingly given up on him ( _if there'd ever been any faith in him to begin with_ ), and as the whole world tries to swat at him like a bothersome insect, he can only grasp for the straws that might tell him what he's done to make humanity hate him so.

Make _himself_ hate him so.

It's difficult to gauge time, chained as much to his bed by his mental distaste for movement as the straps meant to hold him down; every twilight is one eternity dying to give rise to the next, and the former hitman can't be sure if it's weeks or years before his ears catch the sound of his door swinging open, screeching hinges signaling the arrival of his foul-tongued attendant. Blue eyes catch her murky green, and there's nothing unusual about the sourness that splays over her countenance; nothing to set this night apart from the hundreds preceding it save for the newscast seeping into his room through the open door from what must be another room. "It's ten minutes past curfew," she says, but the words are lost on him, his mind preoccupied with straining to hear about the exploits of a world he has decided he'll never be a part of again. "Why are you still up?"

"... bizarre murders of political and religious leaders that have shocked this city over the last few months seem to have ended as suddenly as they began. No terrorist group has come forth claiming responsibility for the slaying," the reporter drones in the distance, monotonous words nearly impossible to make out, but the sound of the nurse's own words overlapping them makes it a greater feat still.

"Hello? _Hello_? … Oh, perhaps you need another shot."

She moves with practiced steps, heels of her shoes clacking against the hard linoleum of his room, but the sound of her footsteps and the sight of the freshly produced syringe are lost under a sudden need to listen to the cast through its entirety. "...spect in custody at the state hospital. His identity is being withheld, ending further investigation. Sports and weather next." A grunt tears itself from his throat as the needle jabs its way through the surface of his skin, but the act of her applying pressure to the plunger, paired with the words still ringing in his ears from the television outside breathe familiarity into the rusted gears of his mind. The noise itself is lost on her, and she smiles a bit to herself as one would at a job well done as she steps away, discarding the used object as well in one fluid motion. Already, a fog is beginning to settle over the vague hints of remembrance ( _and he fights it, fights it hard, because this may be his only chance at answering why he's here to begin with_ ), and it takes the blond more time that he's proud of to process the falsely bright-sounding things she says upon departure.

"That should do it! Sweet dreams..."

Dreams. Yes, dreams; never sweet, though, never sweet. Eyelids pull toward one another, the effort to keep them open greater than the effort to keep himself awake, but he hasn't quite given up on the battle, and the fight for consciousness leaves him able to catch her words on her way through the door. "... you _monster_." Hinges creak for one final time, the door shuts with a great slam –

\- and it all comes rushing back to him.

He remembers the speech at the park, fiery words spilling from Doctor X's lips in Occidental as the crowd roared back. He remembers the revolution, hunting down the man who had inspired him and dedicating his life to the cause of creating a newer, fairer American, freed from the tyranny of political hypocrisy and religious inequality. He remembers the methodical killings, the gun in his hand, the priest the Doctor had enlisted and the nun he had brought with him. The candle lighting, the fresh guilt over crimes long ago committed, the _blackmail_ , the _brainwashing_ \- and the sweet Sister Mary's lifeless eyes staring back at him. His own shattered life looking back at him in the mirror through the eyes of a stranger.

Anger shatters Nikki's mind, liquid fury seeping through the spider web of cracks, and he sucks in a pained gulp of air at the overload of information. Consciousness swings back and forth with him, mind running with the speed of a car to process everything he had forgotten while the drug fought hard to keep him down, and it's in this pendulum of awareness that one thought stands out above all of the other painful thoughts dancing around his mind: All of this - _every single detail_ \- is all the Doctor's fault.

* * *

 **The intention was to put this up sooner, but I kept forgetting to almost immediately after I tried to remind myself to update this. Admittedly, ah - I'm not sure of what else there is to add about this chapter after my whole shpeel at the bottom of the first one, aside from the fact that this probably works better with a gap in between. Mostly because this and Denial both have him starting out without any idea of what's going on, and then suddenly he remembers everything for one reason or another. The gap in time between posts sort of helps with the idea of the gap in time between the night Mary died and the first time (the only time? maybe not the first, but one of many? who even knows?) he remembered why he was in the hospital in the first place. But I dunno. *shrugs into the abyss***

 **Probably going to update this with the next part, Bargaining, sometime later today, so. Get ready to jump an even larger time gap... implying you haven't lost interest already.**


	3. bargaining

_iii. bargaining_

* * *

Sixty-five hundred days. Five hundred sixty-one million seconds. Eighteen years of his life stolen, eaten away by a mental institution he had believed would be his permanent residence until the day he died. Improvement started with vocalness, a stubborn refusal to speak to anyone having hindered his ability to "better his mental state" until he finally chose to open his mouth and communicate. It was blatantly clear, even to a fool like himself, that they didn't believe most any of what he said - in their eyes, the Doctor's revolution was a figment of his imagination, and Mary had never loved him at all - but their greatest fault was thinking that, over time, he'd learned to suppress the rage that had led him there in the first place. All he had learned in that terrible place was how to fake a grin and "admit" that all of the operation was in his head and that he never wanted to find himself within those walls again.

The acrid stench of city air serves as a better sucker punch to the nostrils than any, the sight of direct sunlight for the first time in nearly a score of years burning at his retinas, but the sound of his escort out of the hospital and into the "real world" is a fine enough anchor to keep his mind on earth with the rest of his body. "Hurray for you, convict," the broad-shouldered guard says, malice Nikki has long since grown accustomed to hearing in most anyone's voice dripping from each consonant. "You're a free man." Slamming doors cause him to start, shoulders jumping beneath the familiar and welcomed weight of his tattered trench coat, and without so much as an ounce of effort into helping him integrate with the world that has seen so much while he was strapped down to a monochrome bed, he is, again, alone.

A free man.

If only.

A tentative step - another. Soon, he's sulking down the streets he had once owned, littered with scum he'd once claimed to be a part of and smothered by the drizzle tickling the air. No home, no job; there's money, but he hasn't the slightest idea of what to spend it on. There isn't a name or a face in this city that he knows - not a soul in this city that he _cares_ to know - and only one thought sticks out from the others in his frantic mind; one singular thing that he knows with a certainty. Doctor X is out there somewhere, reveling in the persona he has built from the broken blond's pain, and the only one going to serve the justice that is due is him. The law favors the rich, right? The revolution, however, ( _it's only remaining member_ ) does not.

The former hitman tightens the crisp tie around his neck until the pressure against his skin could choke him, dirty jeans and old t-shirts cast aside in favor of a new attire - a new attitude. He'll mingle with elite, he'll imitate, and no one will ever suspect him to be the one-man death machine they had all feared until he's squeezed them of all the information he needs. The cruel gather around the cruel, the wealthy around obsessively ornate figures, and if there's one chance at finding the demagogue ( _just like the old days, he muses, only the crowd this time is quite the one hundred eighty turn_ ), it's finding him here. He's supposed to be cured, fit for life with the rest of society - but the weight of the gun he's smuggled is a trembling comfort against the inside of his shirt, and the only things he can see and hear are all of the things the Doctor and the nun had shown and said to him all of those many years ago.

He'll never be _cured_ so long as Mary's murderer goes unpunished.

A life for a life. _No_ : One life for many. A hundred corpses, some guilty, some innocent flash through his mind, and Nikki knows that the only thing that will make him feel better is watching Doctor X die at his hands.

* * *

 **As promised, part three uploaded within the same day. Figured it was only fair since, like, I wasted near two months to get part two up. *wipes single tear from cheek* This one's actually the shortest of the bunch with just shy of seven hundred words to its name, but the next one'll be even longer. Even better is that, with the next chapter, we can move on from "Wow, I hate the Doctor" to maybe something with more, uh. Plot? Although, I suppose this was more of a character study or novelization than an intended story. Oh, no - _that'll_ come with the collection of one-shots I'm also working on. Prepared to get filled with fanfiction, empty Operation: Mindcrime fandom. *applies sunglasses***

 **Anywho, thank you very much for reading up until this point. I'll try to make sure that the wait for the next two parts are much shorter than the wait between parts one and two, and hopefully you'll stick around long enough to see this five-part work through to its completion. o/**


	4. depression

_iv. depression_

* * *

Understanding mocks him from three steps ahead, turning on its heel and blowing raspberries until its face has gone vermillion while he strives and struggles to close the distance. Every moment of his life has been spent reaching for some sort of answer or another – why had he been dealt poor cards as a child; why could he never amount to the other children in school; why was the world eating itself while the culprits, every man, woman, and child, blinked in ignorance and blew it away like the seeds of a dandelion; why was he the only one who was strong enough to take the gun in his own hand and use it to right the wrongs that society was too blind to see itself? He'd thought he'd found it in the Doctor's powerful words, in Mary's ever knowing smile, but they took her from him in the winter and spit him out alone in the spring one thousand days later, and everything he'd thought he had learned from them regurgitates itself as another sugarcoated lie. There's revenge to be had in the seeking out and finding of his former employer, a hunt that has taken months and an unfortunate run-in with the law that almost had him back in the hands of that dreadful, dreadful hospital, but there are _truths_ to be had in it as well. Truths that only the demagogue could possibly know. Puppet masters don't pull strings without drawing the greater picture in their mind, nor does a puppet dare to ask what those may be, but a dead woman was as good of a scissor to those ties as any, and if he's to live out the rest of his life in relative peace, he _must_ know why the apocalypse struck him and no one else. Why was _he_ chosen as the operation's central hitman? What was there to gain, if not only wealth, from the planned killings? Who was to blame for the nun's death: the boy with the gun in his hand? the chess player, buried by the foreground and frowning at his pawn's shift in loyalty? the victim herself, driven to desperation by grief and taking her life, for the first and last time, into her own hands?

Nikki buries them all, unanswered, along with what remains of a man he had once strove to be so much like.

The dawn carries with it more rain, the avenger ( _the murderer_ ) trying and failing to recall the last time his city had blessed its citizens with a clear sky. For years, now, he had dreamed of this moment: dirt toppling over the frozen features of the older man's face, twisted into an expression he'd never worn during their work as directionless revolutionists. Joy, displeasure, listlessness, condescension. They'd all come and gone hundreds of times before. Fear, however, is the suit he'd never donned before; it is the one he wears last, and the one he wears best. Graves are meant for remembering, but the hole that has just been filled is meant to forget, and the living member of their distorted duo plunges the head of the shovel into the dirt one last time, vaguely musing that the clouds and the tears they cry may wash away the evidence as much as it will the memory from his mind. For years, now, he had dreamed of this moment and the clarity, the _elation_ it would bring. His feet carry him back to the city, tired knees shuffling him thoughtlessly toward where he was supposed to start his life anew, and he, losing himself in the crowd of the early morning commutes, wonders: where is his clarity? where is his elation? He was supposed to have answers, but they never found his ears, and he was supposed to have closure, but his mind is demanding something that he has no answer to: _And what now_?

Time butterfly kisses his forehead as it passes with the speed of a jet, one day slipping so seamlessly into the next that he can't remember if today is a Thursday or a Sunday, if it's August or November. His feet stumble through the motions like those of a drunkard, mind buried in a haze he couldn't possibly describe with words, and through the general tumult of existence and the sleep he has not been getting in what seems like a decade, he can't even bring himself to be surprised when he catches sight of inky fabric in the crowd of faceless denizens, apparition of a face he once loved shimmering in the newborn hours of the day. Blue eyes lock onto green ( _air; there are no eyes to be seen_ ), and he watches her through a near sightless gaze until she's swallowed whole by the zigzagging of strangers around them. There, then not, and then there again. It isn't the first time he has seen her ghostly image, her hollow eyes staring at him from above when restrained to the ward bed some long time ago, but he remembers what she had told him with each visit and finds dread settling in his heart. Sure enough, when he flees from her forming shape, she follows, tone mimicking that of warmth but lacking the convictions behind it. He sucks in panicked air, footsteps faster as they carry him away from people who don't even care to recognize that he exists, and her mocking words break the silence around them.

"Where are you now?" In life - where is he in life?

"Feeling small -" the blond says, but is interrupted.

"Can't live without it?" His mind jolts at the words, repeated from his days as an insane man when his guilty conscious had created the image of his greatest mistake before his very eyes. "It": the Doctor's death. Days, weeks, _years_ spent pining over the demise of the one he'd believed to be to blame for all of this, and for so long, he'd honestly believed that he could not live so long as _that man_ did just the same. Now – now he doesn't know. One is dead, so the other should be alive, but he certainly doesn't _feel_ alive. Her question and the uncertainty it stirs in him tries to kick the foundation out from beneath him, his whole frame beginning to topple over as he catches the nearby wall with his arm and uses it to keep upright. This, she uses as another knife to the heart. "You call this your best?"

What does she want from him? If he agrees with her, verbalizes all of the self-hating storm that's been brewing in his mind since the day he was born, will she leave him be? Clinging to the idea, needing to be free of the ghost, he admits, "I made my life a mess." It doesn't work, though. Footsteps are silent when there are no feet to make contact with the ground, but he feels her draw closer with the prickle on the back of his neck, and when she speaks, it's louder than it was before.

"Everyone but you sees it."

"What a fool...!" he gasps, anger at himself fueled further by the words he'd heard from so many other people spoken from the mouth of the only one he'd ever let get to him.

"What are you going to do? Make more excuses?" she hisses, suddenly beside him, facade of sweetness melted into acrimony in its purest form. Everything he'd ever done was pin the blame on someone else, and she knows it. _He_ knows it. Doctor X may have told him where to aim, but _he_ was the one pulling the trigger. Mistake after mistake after mistake, and now, there is no one left alive to accuse for them. No one but himself. No one left alive but himself.

"... Why don't you tie it off?"

His heart stops.

Most all of this, he's heard before: the mockery, the belittling, the cruelty. It's always different, another batch of verbal poison to burn the former hitman's flesh for every visit, but they never varied in intensity, and she's never gone so far as to speak of – of _this_. He turns his head, the sight of "Mary" in his periphery becoming a full on gaze, and he wets his lips before seeking confirmation. "... Hang myself?" Lips tug upward, countenance erupting into a grin too malicious to be worn by the face of the sweet Sister Mary, and while he may be able to tell himself with a certainty that this is not her, that not one single part of the disappearing image is _her_ , the seed planted in his mind still manages to sprout long after her silhouette dissolves into the lukewarm summer's air. ( _No one left alive to blame but himself – no one left alive to blame but himself_.)

He buries his questions with what remains of the Doctor, but his mind ( _his heart_ ) floods with more to take their place in the time that follow. What if this – all of this wandering, all of this uncertainty, all of this despair – never changes? He doesn't think he can live the rest of his life in a state between sleep and awareness, caught in a stage of predormitum that never advances into true rest. But what if he _wasn't_ to blame? It wasn't as though he would have had any blood on his hands had he not been fooled by the Doctor, and it wasn't something _he_ did to himself that shattered his mind some eighteen years ago, but Mary's death that had brought him down below even the scum of the streets. And they're – they're _gone_ now, which means that he'll never have to kill, he'll never be labeled insane again. … But they've been gone for some time now, something tells him from the back of his thoughts, and things haven't improved. What if it _never_ gets any better than this?

Nikki's knees buckle beneath him, unable to support the weight of his frame paired with one million tons of grief, and he buries his tear-soaked face in his hands as his back scrapes against the wall behind him. "Oh -" he chokes between sobs, all alone save for the gray blanket over the sky, the towering buildings around him, and the sound of his own pitiful noises echoed back at him in a symphony of worthlessness, "- what if I'm only insane...?"

* * *

 **Mmmmm, part four, and the longest one of them all. Not quite sure what to say about his one aside from the fact that that all of the dialogue here is taken from the lyrics of An Intentional Confrontation (and a bit of A Junkie's Blues at the end, just because I kind of like that song, oops) which will explain why some of it seems a little... well, not natural sounding, I guess? Actually, if I'm remembering right, all of the dialogue up until this point has been taken directly from the rock opera, as it will continue to do so until - well, I suppose you'll just have to wait for the final part in order to find out. ;D A** **lso, I really, _really_ wanted to write the Doctor into this part because hot darn, do I love the character interaction between these two. (Despite Mindcrime II's, uh... blatant flaws, there are a handful of good songs, and The Chase is definitely one of them.) Unfortunately, that would have led to a chapter at least twice as long as this already is, and seeing as it's already about twice as long as Bargaining, I figured that I'd just... shave that part off. And cry internally about it.**

 **Anywho, that's all for now. The last part will be up... well, honestly, whenever I remember to/feel like putting it up. Hope you've enjoyed everything up until this point, and hope to see you for part five of five~!**


	5. acceptance

v. acceptance

* * *

Nikki accepts his fate and falls like autumn leaves – unassuming, unnoticed, and unliving.

The world he had fought tooth and nail to protect is no place for him now, every effort wasted and every nose upturned; America will never change, they tell him through eyes chipped from icebergs and backs turned away, and he was as much of a fool for thinking that ending the Doctor's life would reignite his own as he was a fool for thinking a gun in his hand and a dream in his mind would be able to combat the force of millions. _Stubborn_ millions. They don't want him here, in their city, in their country, and when he looks at himself in the mirror ( _a stranger: blue eyes emptier, skeletal cheeks somehow more hollow_ ), he muses that he doesn't quite want himself here, either. To put the barrel of his Beretta against his temple is more of a service for the world than anything else he has ever done, and he has _always_ been a man of the people, even if they never quite knew it. He breathes, he sees, he cries – ( _his index finger jerks, and he sleeps_ ).

* * *

When the blond wakes, heavy lidded eyes protesting his movement and brain exploding with the force of a fission bomb, his immediate thought is that he should not have woken at all. Lungs flutter with air, his heart beating to the rhythm of a child first sitting down behind the drum set, but his eyes won't see and his mind won't think beyond his first thought, repeated in a mantra that echoes off the boundaries of a room he can't make out through blackened eyes. Fingers rake against the floor, grab for walls he cannot seem to reach from his spot splayed across the floor, dust against his wound – or, at least, where it should be. Pale light floods in from beneath the floor, and he realizes simultaneously that he wasn't blind so much as in a dark, dark room, and that the self-inflicted blow to the head has either been rendered useless, or never happened at all.

A dream? It couldn't be. The harsh lighting of the living room, the smell of rain from outside, the biting cold wind from the opened window lashing out against tear-caked cheeks – all too real to be conjured by an overactive mind from a rare bout of deep sleep. But at the same time, there is no bullet hole, which means it couldn't have been _real_ , either. He fumbles as he tries to discern what is fact from what is fiction, more and more light crawling from the cracks beneath his tennis shoes at the racing of his thoughts, and he can't say how long footsteps have been ringing throughout the air around him before they fully process in his mind, lifting eyes from calloused hands and into the half light of his surroundings.

He sees her form before he sees her face, pale light cascading around her like a veil, and his mind stills like the rest of his body to make room for a name.

"... Mary?" Nikki dares to ask, syllables dancing across the paralyzed air in a waltz that never ends. Time had already been "kind" enough to show him her image ( _twisted, cold_ ) in the eternities following her death, and for a fleeting second, suspicion blossoms in the back of his head. Futile attempts to steel himself at what may very well be another verbal barrage that had driven him to the furthest point, the likes of which he's beginning to doubt ever truly happened at all. Her mouth draws itself into a smile, however, lips upturned in a manner that holds more shameful hesitance than enmity, and the worries wane on cue. Black habit traded for a snow gown – black words traded for pure affection. ( _Not a dream after all._ )

"Nikki," the deceased says. Remorse flickers in the leafy hues of her eyes as his name falls from the tip of her tongue, something pleading in the way she speaks as though she had played some heinous part in setting about everything that had ruined his life in the last eighteen years. No; that's wrong. That's wrong, and even if it hadn't been, he forgives her, _he forgives her_ -

He howls her name like one last war cry in the same moment he leaps to his feet, moving in desperate motions to the only one who'd really cared for him ( _the only one he'd really cared for in turn_ ) and embracing her with a force that would have sent her toppling to the ground had he not caught her in his arms. Words can't hope to describe what he's feeling, and he abandons them without ever giving them a try, trading them in, instead, for feather-light kisses peppered across her face and staccato, whispered promises that had been stolen from him in the night he had confessed to her these same feelings - in the night she had died. Elation promised at the demise of the Doctor cannot compare to what he feels when she reciprocates the hug, dainty arms wrapped around his tattered trench coat and fingers digging into the folds. Perhaps they could have wished for better circumstances than a mutual loss of life – but she is here, and he is here, and he thinks that it is more than enough for him.

It starts with her death and ends with his own, the world around them erupting into brilliant light so strong that he thinks he might go blind and the body in his arms growing weightless in his grip. His own legs seem to disappear as much in sight as in weight, invisible now in the supernova engulfing them, and he pulls away just long enough to catch her eye one last time. A smile – _two_ , devoured in a sea of white.

Nikki burns the image of Mary's face in his mind and finally learns to let go.

* * *

 **Probably too late to issue that suicide trigger warning. Well - I suppose it's vague enough. c':**

 **And with this "exciting" conclusion, our story comes to an end. I'd take this moment to complain about how terrible of an ending _All the Promises_ was, even more so in comparison to how perfect _Eyes of a Stranger_ brought together the first one, and even _more_ so considering that Nikki, Mary, DX, and That Guy No One Like have their story capped off with _that -_ but the completion of this (albeit already completed) story is a happy occasion. Heck, this must be the first non-one-shot story I've completed on this account. (Don't be surprised if it's the last. ouo) Are they in Heaven at the end? Are they actually being whisked away to the underworld? Maybe the whole ending doesn't exist at all. Not like we really understood what was going on when we listened to the song to begin with. Guess it'll forever be a lazy, unexplained ending.**

 **Just because the Five Stages is over, though, doesn't mean I'm not done attempting to introduce rock opera fanfiction to . As of right now, I'm currently a few one-shots into a collection that will, admittedly, never be finished (as much as I would love to write number one hundred... prooooooobably not happening), so if I can just figure out how to finish the one I'm stuck on, anyone who's interested might be getting to see a few of those in the future. Anything from novelizations of existing canon (like this), what-if stories before, after, or between songs, crazy AUs, and maybe a story where Doctor X tries to contract with Kyuubey and become a magical girl (magical... boy? man? scumbag?); whatever you can think of _might_ be there. Either way, prepare for an avalanche of head canons a year-and-a-half in the making. Until then? Happy reading!**


End file.
